


Dark Places

by Parks and Fluff (GamblingDementor)



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Bullying, Depression, F/M, Gen, slices of life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 14:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4440020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GamblingDementor/pseuds/Parks%20and%20Fluff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some thoughts about April's teenage years. Pretty dark at times. Happy ending.</p><p> </p><p>CW: mentions of suicide. No actual going through with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Places

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a really weird and dark place and I just apologize if you feel offended. I'll take this down if people don't want me to keep it. A lot of this is personal experience, so don't think I'm all talking things out of my ass.

The idea first comes to her at twelve in a park. She's on a school trip visiting Indianapolis and she's lost. She notices it when she turns around, about to ask a question ( _Did they ever find a dead body in this pond?_ ) and no one's behind her to answer. She's on her own. Any of the other kids would start looking for help immediately, probably. April has never been one of the other kids. She's always been something else, the one people don't know how to deal with, the one they tease or mock or taunt, the one that's never part of a group, the one that no one wants to talk to other than to make fun of. And she's been fine with that, in a way. People are weird, other kids are gross, school is pointless. Everything is pointless. She sits on a bench next to the pond and asks herself if the class is looking for her, if anyone even noticed or cared. What if they came back and found her body in the water? Would they care at all? Would they even notice her there, floating on the surface of the pond? She's been invisible to everyone's eyes for so long. How ironic would it be that death finally gives her some visibility?

 

When she talks to Natalie about it, her sister rolls her eyes and tells her it's lame. Who even cares about any of that? It's not like she would actually go through with it for real, so why talk about it?

 

At some point, Orin becomes her friend, somehow. They hate the world together. Orin is  _fine_ , probably. When the others call him weird, or a monster, or creepy, he stares at them blankly until they walk away. April wonders if he cares, if he's just pretending not to. If all this eats him alive from the inside or if he honestly doesn't feel anything about it. Someties, she wishes she could just wrench her heart away from her chest, stop having any sort of feelings, stop this force inside her that's pulling from her guts, pulling her closer and closer to the dark in her head, this patch of shadows that tells her  _nothing matters at all_  and that she might as well end it all now.

 

She steals a lot. Hides things away for people to go look after them, for others to know what it feels like to have lost something without knowing how or why. Sometimes she throws them away, sometimes she keeps them for herself. She doesn't care. Her parents catch her more than once and tell her off, ask her why she does that. How could they possibly understand what it feels like to constantly feel like you're broken, like someone took away a piece of you, that part that everyone else seems to have and that makes them feel like actual normal people who are able to feel happiness?

 

What's great about Orin is that he never talks. What's horrible and frustrating about Orin is that he  _never_  talks. At fifteen, she asks him if he's ever thought about ending it all. He stares and shakes his head.

 

Her parents will never understand. One day, she comes hom to them furious. They tell her they found her journal and  _how could she possibly think about that kind of thing_? Doesn't she know how much they love her? How devastated they felt when they read what she'd written? They tell her that suicide is selfish and wrong and make her promise that she'll never think about it ever again. She breaks that promise the second they leave her alone to her thoughts.

 

School never gets better. At all. If the actual bullying stopped at some point after a teacher caught her in the middle of it one too many time and the bullies got scared into leaving her alone, the solitude is just as painful. Feeling like she barely exists hurts. One day, she tries to actually stop talking altogether and it takes four days for anyone to even notice. Or maybe Orin noticed. There is no way to tell. Maybe he liked her better silent.

 

She counts how long her parents can go without asking her what's wrong. Six days under normal circumstances. Ten if she's on her phone a lot. Truth is she has no one to talk to. She pretends to text, but she just plays dumb games or read dumb shit. It makes them believe she's fine.

 

She gets good at crying silently over the years, and then even better at not crying at all, keeping the tears inside her where no one can see them, not even her.

 

She asks Orin if he would do it with her, just go through with it, end it. She's been alone for too long. Sometimes it feels like she was born for solitude and every time she makes a friend, she's just getting a ticking bomb between her hands and it's just a matter of time before they leave. Maybe Orin is different. Maybe he'll give her this last present, the gift of not going alone. But he stares at her for two full minutes before telling her, in his monotonous whisper, that he'd like her to stay. He doesn't give any explanation, doesn't even say another word, in fact, just stares. For half a second she thinks she sees the hint of a smile there, some sort of compassion. But that's absurd. Orin never smiles. 

 

They say college is the beginning of a new life, yet she's been here for months and it's all just as shitty as it was in high school. She doesn't get to see Orin as often, but she meets Derek, who hates people as much as she does. They hang out, and she meets other people as well. She hates most of them. She can't go around not talking for as long as she used to, but she only opens her mouth to talk trash about everyone. 

 

She randomly accepts an internship at the department of who cares in Whatever Hall. She gets her own desk and the woman in charge is so involved in everything that April can get away with not actually working. Some days − most days − she comes in late and the only one who notices is Jerry. She instantly decides to hate him forever and nothing will ever change that. Hanging out at work is no worse than hanging out in college, though. People suck. Work sucks. Parks suck. 

 

The void inside her never really goes away. Whenever Leslie tells her she's smart, or beautiful, or interesting, or funny, or important, the dark thoughts inside her tell her she's lying, she can't be telling the truth, she can't be right. Nothing she does is cool. She can't be that person Leslie describes. So Leslie's lying. 

 

She's left alone in the department when everyone goes away on some hunting trip and likes it that way. Everyone surrounding her is too much, and she's felt alone for so long that she sometimes feels more comfortable when she actually is. But then, she isn't. Andy's here after she called him in when she needed to take a bathroom break, and he just won't leave. And she loves it. She has no way of explaining it: she just sees him, listens to him, and loves it. He laughs at things she says as if she wasn't the creepy ball of hatred she tries to be. He looks at her as if she was actually worth looking at, worth talking to, worth hanging out with. And that makes  _her_  feel like there's things worth doing in life, like there's people she's allowed not to hate. They spend a day together doing weird shit, and it's the best day she's had in years. Maybe in her life. She's just going to have to live the next day, and the next, to try to feel this way again. 


End file.
